VI-DRIVESIM

“The motivation for DiM wasn’t that difficult considering top management is pushing very hard for increased usage of virtual tools. The financial motivation was basically to tie the number of prototype weeks we could remove by using the DiM instead. More importantly though, since I became manager of Vehicle Dynamics I have consistently tried to improve the objective targets and be less reliable on subjective sign-off’s, but it’s a very slow process as the experience of the subjective team is on average 15-20 years. The DiM promises to tie together the subjective expertise with the CAE teams objective analysis expertise in a way previously not possible, cross-pollinating both teams and unifying the whole department. This is simply priceless and my hope is that it will boost knowledge-building and experimentation tremendously.”

— Stefan Karlsson, Vehicle Dynamics Manager, Volvo

VI-DriveSim is a revolutionary turnkey solution from VI-grade which provides automotive engineers with a complete set of innovative, integrated driving simulators for a new generation approach to system-level simulation, allowing companies to bridge the gap between virtual prototyping and testing. VI-DriveSim provides the ability of “feeling” the results of your simulations in a totally immersive environment starting from early phases of the development process.

VI-DriveSim is available in two different configurations: static and dynamic. In the static configuration, users have the possibility to drive a virtual vehicle model, visualizing vehicle behavior on a wide screen with unprecedented high-quality and low-latency graphics while sitting on a fixed cockpit. The dynamic configuration provides motion feedback to the driver thanks to an innovative nine-degrees-of-freedom moving platform with reduced overall dimensions and large travels. The new machine architecture is calledDriver in Motion (DiM)and its kinematics has been designed, for the first time in history of motion platforms, for implementing in the best possible way the motion cueing technology that has been developed and tested by VI-grade. VI-DriveSim is based on a much more compact and much less expensive driving simulator architecture with respect to conventional simulators with similar workspace. Moreover, VI-DriveSim is fully scalable, meaning that it is possible to upgrade from static to dynamic simulator, reusing all components that have been already purchased.

Vehicle development for best handling, comfort and acoustics is becoming more and more complex and involves different disciplines. This is why automakers are introducing a new hybrid step in the complex assessment process between virtual prototyping and vehicle on-road testing, including the human in the development loop at an earlier stage. VI-DriveSim is the right solution for testing virtual vehicle missions with a real driver who can get a “feeling” of the car behavior by driving a highly accurate digital surrogate in a realistic environment.